The Latest from Boing Boing

The Ineffable Cruelty of Scrabble
iPhone hardware boss leaves Apple
Mall requires kids to have adult escorts
Fareed Zakaria returns ADL award as protest over Ground Zero mosque
Former SF City sysadmin gets 4 year sentence for refusing to hand over passwords
Report: Saudi Arabia and RIM reach BlackBerry deal
Walking Dead 12: Relentless zombie comic offers respite, and its own problems

Posted: 03 Aug 2010 07:55 PM PDT

Posted: 07 Aug 2010 02:32 PM PDT

The NYT reports that Mark Papermaster, Apple's man in charge of iPhone hardware, has left the company. He will be replaced by Nigel Antennamaster.

Mall requires kids to have adult escorts

Posted: 07 Aug 2010 09:43 AM PDT

A mall in Cincinnati, Ohio is now requiring anyone under 18 to have a 21+ escort with them after 4pm on Fridays and Saturdays. Apparently, security guards at all the entrances will card shoppers and provide wristbands. From WCPO:

Management at Tri-County Mall says it should make for a more pleasant shopping experience for their customers.
"Being youth, and being in large numbers unsupervised, they tend to get loud and rowdy and detract from a comfortable shopping atmosphere.," said General Manager Michael Lyons.

"Mall implements 'youth escort policy'" (Thanks, Charles Pescovitz!)

Fareed Zakaria returns ADL award as protest over Ground Zero mosque

Posted: 07 Aug 2010 02:59 PM PDT

Newsweek columnist and CNN host Fareed Zakaria this week returned a 2005 award from the ADL (which included 10 thousand dollars) because of the ADL's recent statements against building a mosque near Ground Zero. He explains why here. Zakaria's opinion piece on the mosque controversy itself is here. The ADL says they'll hold on to his award, and the check. From the response by the ADL's National Director: "I am not only saddened but stunned and somewhat speechless."

Former SF City sysadmin gets 4 year sentence for refusing to hand over passwords

Posted: 07 Aug 2010 09:23 AM PDT

45-year-old Terry Childs, a former sysadmin for the city of San Francisco, was sentenced Friday to four years in prison for refusing to hand over administrative passwords to the city's FiberWAN network back in July 2008. A judge convicted Childs in April of violating state hacking laws.

Although the city's network continued to run during the 12 days that Childs refused to hand over control, jurors found that by denying the city the administrative control to its own network, Childs had violated state law.
Childs defended his actions during a long court trial, saying that he was only doing his job, and that his supervisor, Department of Technology and Information Services Chief Operations Officer Richard Robinson, was unqualified to have access to the passwords. Childs eventually handed over the passwords to San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom.
Prosecutors characterized the former network administrator as a power hungry control freak who couldn't be managed.

Terry Childs gets four year sentence (Computer Security Online)

Arrested network admin holds SF city FiberWAN network hostage ...

Report: Saudi Arabia and RIM reach BlackBerry deal

Posted: 07 Aug 2010 10:07 AM PDT

The Wall Street Journal today reports that in Saudi Arabia, the government division responsible for telecom oversight has reached a preliminary agreement with BlackBerry maker RIM, based in Canada, over the matter of government access to BlackBerry messaging data.

The solution includes a concession from RIM to cooperate with local telecoms, and set up a data server inside the country so the Saudi government can surveil text messages and other data to when needed (not unlike the wiretapping access already enjoyed by our own government, here in the USA):

"A preliminary agreement has already been reached and a formal deal between the parties is in the final stages of negotiations," an official at a Saudi-based telecom operator involved in the talks said. When asked if the agreement involved installing a local server in the kingdom, the person, who declined to be named, said "yes."
(...) The Saudi government has been discussing with RIM the possibility of getting access to data when there's a pressing national-security concern, a person familiar with the situation said Friday. In the past, the parties had also discussed the possibility of placing BlackBerry servers inside the country, the person added.
RIM has come under pressure from authorities in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and several other countries in the region and beyond to provide greater access to the encrypted information sent by its BlackBerry devices. The U.A.E.'s Telecommunication Regulatory Authority said it would block key BlackBerry services due to national-security concerns from Oct. 11.

Saudi Arabia, Research In Motion Reach Deal (WSJ, subscription required)

Update: Here's an Associated Press item with more detail (and more named sources).

Walking Dead 12: Relentless zombie comic offers respite, and its own problems

Posted: 07 Aug 2010 09:09 AM PDT

I've just read the twelfth collection in the chilling, gripping Walking Dead zombie comic series, Life Among Them, and as always, I raced through the pages, on edge to discover what happened next.

The Walking Dead is remarkable for both its relentless pacing and its relentless pessimism, a series in which the plight of characters who have endured the unimaginable nevertheless grows steadily and intractably worse. The trick, then, is to write a series in which things get monotonically worse and yet there always dangles the prospect of hope, a glimmer of light deep at the end of the tunnel.

In volume 12, the light grows considerably brighter as the nomadic survivors encounter a model walled community that seems too good to be true; the characters are now tried not by the zombies or homicidal rivals, but by the agonizing questions of trust, of returning to normalcy, of confronting the lives the led while on the road and fighting for their survival.

As always, I finished it slavering for more, and even now am eagerly awaiting the thirteenth collection.

Walking Dead Volume 12: Life Among Them